Source - iOS

Getting Started with Astronomer Clickstream - iOS

Using our analytics-iOS library, you can start sending customer data from your app to Astronomer, giving you valuable user data that yields actionable insights for your business. Follow the steps below to get started in only a few minutes.

Create an iOS Source in the Astronomer UI

After logging in with your Astronomer credentials, add a new Source → iOS. Give your source a friendly name and copy that Source ID for the next step.

Install the SDK

We recommend installing Analytics-iOS via Cocoapods as it allows you to create a build with specific destinations and makes it simple to install and upgrade.

Just add the Analytics dependency to your Podfile with:

Pod `AstronomerAnalytics`, `~> 3.6.9`

Then, run a pod install inside your terminal, or from CocoaPods.app. Then, in your applicaton delegate’s application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: method, set up the SDK like this:

Now that you have the SDK installed and setup, you are ready to start building out functionality. Keep reading to learn how to use the identify call on your app.

Identify Your Users

The identify method helps you associate your users and their actions to a unique and recognizable userID and any optional traits that you know about them. We recommend calling an identify a single time - when the user’s account is first created and only again when their traits change.

Note: Users are automatically assigned an anonymousID before you identify them. The userID is then what connects anonymous activity across mobile iOS devices.

This call is identifying a user by her unique userID (from your database) and associating her with name, email, and role traits.

Note: When you add an identify to your iOS app, you will need to replace all those hard-coded strings with details about the currently logged-in user.

Once you have the identify call implemented, you’re ready to move on to the track call.

Track Your Users’ Actions

To get to a more complete event tracking analytics setup, you can add a track call to your app. This will tell Astronomer which actions users are performing in your app. With track, each user action triggers an “event”, which can also have associated properties.

To start, our SDK can automatically track a few common events (e.g. Application_Installed, Application_Opened, and Application_Updated) - you will just need to enable this option during initialization. In addition to these, you will likely want to track some events that are success indicators for your app - like Viewed Product, Email Sign Up, Item Purchased, etc.

Setting up a track is very similar to the process you just went through to set up an identify. Here’s the basic, sample track:

This example track call tells us that a user just triggered an “Item Purchased” event for an item called “Cat Feather Toy” and revenue of 9.99.

Note: In order to use a track call, you must specify a name for the event you want to track whereas properties and options are all optional fields.

A lot of analytics tools support custom event mapping so, with track implemented, you’ll be able to attribute events to your users and start targeting them in a more informed and relevant way.

Flushing

You can specify the number of events that should queue before flushing. Set this to 1 to send events as they come in (i.e. not batched) but note that it will use more battery. Also note that this is 20 by default.

Submitting to the App Store

When submitting to the App Store, beware that Astronomer collects the IDFA for use in doing mobile install attribution with destinations like Mobile App Tracking. Even if you’re not currently doing mobile install attribution, if you get asked, “Does this app use the Advertising Identifier (IDFA)?” on this page, you’ll want to check the following three boxes:

“Attribute this app to a previously sent advertisement”

“Attribute an action taken within this app to a previously served advertisement”

“I, YOUR_NAME, confirm that this app, and any third party…”

Unless you are actually going to display ads in your app, do not check the box labeled “Serve advertisements within the app”.

Congratulations, you can now use Astronomer Analytics in your iOS app! Time to start hitting your business with insightful user data.